Autonomous Cars in More Cities, Pushback Against Smart Cities, and More on Five For Wednesday

Welcome to Five for Wednesday, our weekly round-up of tech-focused news.

Dallas adds itself to the list of cities making autonomous vehicles available between city landmarks. Dallas is an incredibly car-dependent city, and the start-up bringing AVs in is hoping to alleviate congestion by offering self-driving shuttles during peak driving times between popular destinations.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is launching a self-driving competitor to Uber and Lyft. The project is a highly-guarded secret, and is thought to be sending it first fleet of cars into the Phoenix metro area in early December. We’ll be keeping an eye out on this!

Last month, I told you about Sidewalk Labs’ (another Alphabet company) pilot program in Toronto to rethink the smart city. The ambitious undertaking has recently come under fire from multiple groups, citing surveillance and data privacy concerns. I think the idea of the public civic trust of data sounds great on the outside, but would be interested in the details of that trust, and it looks like others are wanting information as well.

Speaking of surveillance, the “smart neighborhood” is a trend we identified to watch for 2019, and we’re starting to see the pushback when neighbors start using their doorbells to set up a passive (but very digitally present) “neighborhood watch.” The “sharing video with your neighbors” trend started with footage of cute animals in yards going viral, but now has grown to include entirely crime-focused footage sharing apps. Again, the key here is about balancing the surveillance aspect between “too intrusive” and “helpful for the community,” and the balance of those two purposes is not as cut and dry as we’d hope.

Having houseguests for the holidays? Build them an Alexa skill to let them know how to use the finicky universal remote, where to find spare towels, or what creaky step to skip on the staircase.

And this week’s bonus, spend some time with the Emoji Builder online app that I can’t stop using – making Emoji more nuanced means I can fully express myself with icons such as “smiling angry surprised face with hand covering mouth.”